New Ritz Gallery opens at the MFA

Chris Bergeron

Saturday

Nov 22, 2008 at 12:01 AMNov 22, 2008 at 9:21 PM

Herb Ritts made his name photographing celebrities naked, half-clothed or robed -- from Cindy Crawford to Madonna and the Dalai Lama. So it's fitting the inaugural exhibit in the first gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts devoted to photography and bearing his name celebrates the sensuous, sagging and sublime splendor of the human figure.

Herb Ritts made his name photographing celebrities naked, half-clothed or robed -- from Cindy Crawford to Madonna and the Dalai Lama.

So it's fitting the inaugural exhibit in the first gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts devoted to photography and bearing his name celebrates the sensuous, sagging and sublime splendor of the human figure.

They are among 75 images on display in "Photographic Figures," the first exhibit in the MFA's new Herb Ritts Gallery now permanently devoted to photography.

Organized by MFA curator Anne E. Havinga, the show offers a satisfying range of figure studies from classical to experimental by 20th century masters including Ritts and lesser-knowns.

Visitors will see black-and-white and some color images by accomplished photographers like Berenice Abbott, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Yousuf Karsh, Eugene Smith, Edward Weston and others. Several of the biggest surprises are by less widely known photographers such as Alexey Brodovitch, Daido Moriyama, Gary Schneider and Arno Rafael Minkkinen.

A $2.5 million gift from the Herb Ritts Foundation to the museum's campaign, Building the New MFA, made the 1,080-square-foot gallery possible. The museum is in the midst of a $500 million building project to add a new East Wing for American art that will be finished in 2010.

Born in 1952, Ritts left the family furniture business to study economics and art history at Bard College. In 1978 his nascent interest in photography took off after his beefcake photo of then-unknown actor Richard Gere at a gas station was published after the success of "American Gigolo."

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Ritts gained international fame as a celebrity photographer whose pictures of Elizabeth Taylor, Stephen Hawking, Christopher Reeve and many others appeared in GQ, Rolling Stone, Vogue, Elle and other popular magazines. He died in 2002 from pneumonia complicated by AIDS.

The senior curator of photographs, Havinga said the new gallery will be "dedicated to exhibiting photographs of all types and all periods."

Describing the new show, she said it was "appropriate to start with an exhibit that could highlight photographs from the museum's collection" of 5,000 images dating back to the mid-1800s.

Havinga organized the exhibit into loose groupings, such as the face, limbs, hands, nudes and figural studies.

While the human form has inspired a vast range of art in all media, Havinga largely succeeds by choosing photos from the MFA's collection new acquisitions and some loans that include many of the best-known styles of the last century.

Weston's straightforward muscular male "Torso" could have been the model for Michelangelo's sculpted "David." As if shot in a Times Square peep booth, Daido Moriyama's close-up of a woman in fishnet tights straddles art and voyeurism. Fifteen years before dying in the Holocaust, Imre Kinski created a nightmare scene of shadowy figures walking along a Budapest street.

Rather than focusing on the beauty of the human form, many photographers sought to capture the body's ability to signal social role and status by posture.

Joining the fraternity of loneliness, a neatly dressed man with drooping sock naps next to bums in Cartier-Bresson's "Boston Common (Men Sleeping on Grass)." In Tofik Shakhverdiev's grim "Moscow," a line of Russian soldiers, cropped at the neck and gripping thick truncheons, conveys totalitarianism's brutal authority. Matthew Pilsbury's ghostly photo of a man lying in a darkened room gazing into a glowing Gameboy depicts alienation in a digital world.

Gorgeous or ghastly, the photographers of "Photographic Figures" visually echo Hamlet's exclamation, "What a piece of work is man."

Bill Brandt accomplishes the near-impossible by making knees and feet sleekly glamorous. If you've ever considered nudism, John Benson's photo of the fleshy patriarch of a nudist family should convince you to keep your pants on.

And Ritts' image of Jackie Joyner-Kersee sprinting airborne above her shadow celebrates her muscular grace as an ideal of human perfection.

There were no cameras when Shakespeare's Hamlet declared of man, "in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!"

Whether shooting an African woman's delicate hands, a brazen French nude or even Sinead O'Connor's knobby shaved head, these photographers would agree.

THE ESSENTIALS:

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is open seven days a week. Hours: 10 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Saturday through Tuesday, and 10 a.m. to 9:45 p.m. Wednesday through Friday. (After 5 p.m. Thursday and Friday only the West Wing is open.)

General admission (which includes two visits in a 10-day period) is $17 for adults and $15 for seniors and students 18 and older. Admission for students who are university members is free as is admission for children under 17 during non-school hours.

A lavishly illustrated book, "MFA Highlights: Photography," featuring 100 stunning photographs from the museum's collection, has been published in connection with the Ritts' exhibit. It sells for $22.50.